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another threat.
    With this, the safehouse-wide alert buzzer went off, honking in every room.
    Evidently Zack’s minute was up.

Firefight
    “Sitrep,” Zack said, striding in, his marble mask back in place.
    Maximum Bob was still there, and Dugan slipped in behind, returning from kitting down in his room. Baxter was at his station on a secure desk phone, but quickly handed it off to Zack, who got busy listening and nodding.
    “Altringham. Yes… affirmative… understood. Roger that. Send a grid reference and wait out.” He hit a button on the console, put the phone down, then turned to the room and its three expectant faces. “It’s the Army SF Ops Desk at Lemonnier. They’ve got troops in contact in Somaliland, and their armed air assets are cycling. They want to know if we can scare up something for them, RFN.”
    Baxter swiveled back to his station and started flipping through windows. “I’ll see if I can find a local Predator… something being flown out of Creech that we can re-task…”
    But Zack was already logging in to his station and flipping through things himself. “Hold that. I’ve got a Reaper.” Twice the size, twice the endurance, and four times the payload and weapons mounts. Because eight Hellfires are always better than two…
    It took Zack about four minutes to get operational control of the MQ-9 Reaper, call sign Reamer One-Five, and get it inbound and streaming video from over the right coordinates. At that point, a couple of things quickly became obvious.
    “Not our guys,” Dugan said, leaning in over Zack’s shoulder.
    “Not our guys,” Zack agreed.
    He’d got the drone doing a wide racetrack circuit around the grid coords that had been passed by the SF ops guys. The high-res color video feed made the absence of Americans fairly obvious.
    “Fucking chaos down there, though,” Dugan said. “Get him to come around again.”
    So far, there were only two groups visible in this boonie firefight – the raggedy-ass Islamist militia types; and the uniformed soldiers, who were clearly SNA, Somali National Army. Though one did have to be careful not to assume the raggedy-ass guys weren’t American operators, with spec-ops laxity of uniforms…
    “Definitely looks like a militia versus SNA scrap,” Baxter agreed, assessing the same feed from his station.
    “Yeah,” Dugan said, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t have people down there. Could easily be a mentoring patrol, with a small SF element, and we’re just not seeing them yet.” It was true that one of the main jobs of Army Special Forces (Green Berets) was mentoring local friendly forces. And that was definitely something the SF ODAs out of Lemonnier had been doing – training up SNA, so the Somalis could control their own territory and take the fight to a-S and other Islamist insurgents.
    Zack instructed the drone pilot, who was sitting in a trailer in Nevada, to tighten up his circuit; and then started zooming the optics around, looking for Special Forces guys. But he quickly decided what he really needed to get patched through directly to the team on the ground. When supporting troops from the air, nothing is to be avoided so much as middlemen.
    Fuck it , he thought, I’m going to disintermediate two at once . He started with firing the drone pilot.
    “Bob, can you go get ready to fly this Reaper?” Tier-1 guys have sprawling skill sets, and Bob’s extended to piloting UAVs.
    “Roger that,” he said to Zack’s back, moving his big bulk smartly over to the portable UAV Ground Control Station they had wedged into the corner. This consisted of a wide, rugged, lightweight, black case set up on its own spindly legs, like an electric piano stand. When Bob flipped the case open, inside was a small docked laptop on the left, a block of electronics (like a rack server) on the right, a 17-inch LCD above that, two stubby radio antennas, a mouse – and a PlayStation-style controller, once Bob pulled that out. He started the